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Fresco painting in Italy
An American artist/architect continues a time-honoured art form
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In the chapel of a small church in the Mugello, an area north of Florence that was favoured by the Medici, American artist/architect David T. Mayernik has been executing a cycle of paintings depicting the martyrdom of the church’s eponymous third-century saint, S. Cresci. The series illustrates the saint and two acolytes as they travel throughout this Tuscan locality; their mission is to disseminate Christianity and to evangelise its citizenry. Their success is met with incarceration and subsequent martyrdom—this was the era of the Christian-intolerant emperor, Decius. Mayernik has captured this tale using a medium that has a history that goes back to the time when S. Cresci traversed the very Tuscan landscape on which the church now stands: fresco, or a fresco in Italian.
Fresco (derived from the Italian word affresco, meaning “fresh”) is a technique in which natural pigments coming from earth and other minerals are mixed with water and applied to a freshly plastered wall or ceiling. The plaster base consists of slaked lime (lime and water made into a putty) mixed with an aggregate such as freshwater sand, volcanic ash or marble powder. The chemical elements in the damp plaster allow the surface to act as a sponge that absorbs and sets fast the pigments upon drying. Once the wall has dried, however, bonding of the pigment/water compound is inhibited; meticulous planning must be done ahead of time so that each section of the painting (the giornata, or day’s work) can be accomplished within the seven to nine hours that the wall remains damp. Fresco paintings are highly durable, and the elements involved are relatively inexpensive. The technique has been employed since antiquity (examples dating from 1500 BC can be found in Greece, and it was popularized among the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Rome), but in Italy it reached a significant evolution during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the technique was adopted by artistic titans such as Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael and Michelangelo.
Mayernik’s cycle consists of five lunettes, of which he has now completed three. The impetus for the series occurred providentially. In this chapel, two large oil paintings of the Madonna and St John had been mounted together in one frame and hung over the altar. The two figures are often represented together in crucifixion paintings (flanking the foot of the cross), so the mounted painting was clearly missing the essential part of this story. In 2001 Lynn Aeschliman, a neighbour of the church who runs the TASIS American school in Switzerland where Mayernik works as the campus architect, suggested to the caretakers that he should paint the missing crucifixion. Mayernik didn’t want to “fake” an oil painting in the same style as the original, so he proposed painting a frescoed crucifixion that would complete the scene’s narrative by linking the historical world of the oil painting with the modern world of the chapel and its worshippers.
To prepare the wall for painting, the existing layer of white paint had to be removed. To everyone’s surprise the plasterer uncovered an 18th-century frescoed Annunciation. The work stopped, and the cultural authorities were called in. It was therefore agreed that Mayernik would paint the fresco on one of the sidewalls, but another snag occurred when he realized the ceiling was lower here than over the altar, so he had to rethink the composition. An oval fresco of the martyrdom of S. Cresci was to hang above Christ’s head. This was changed to an oval trompe l’oeil window placed behind Christ’s head, which gives the powerful illusion that the crucifixion is actually taking place in the chapel itself. Seeing an opportunity to enrich the chapel further, Mayernik designed a series of five oval paintings that would fill the five sidewall-bays with scenes of the saint’s final days. The designs were met with great enthusiasm and in 2003 he completed the first of the series. He plans on completing the final two in the spring of 2010.
Mayernik, whose art encompasses work in water colour, oil and fresco, became fascinated with fresco while studying in Rome with the University of Notre Dame’s architecture programme. After graduating he attempted to learn the process, but in the United States no art schools offered a course on the technique. He poured over art books at a local library before discovering a crucial chapter on fresco in Ralph Mayer’s The Artist’s Handbook. In 1989 he won a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, which also came with a travel grant. A fellow classmate living in Italy informed him that Leonetto Tintori (the renowned artist-cum-fresco restorer, noted for restoring the frescoes in the Cimitero Monumentale in Pisa, and many in Florence after the flood of 1966) had started a school in his home outside Prato. Mayernik didn’t have to think twice; he spent two weeks at Tintori’s school, which he ran like a mediaeval bottega (atelier) where young apprentices learned theory and practice by copying the master. Finding a way to bridge his love of painting and architecture, Mayernik copied the frescoes of the 18th-century painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, whose use of fictive architectural elements (e.g. in the rooms of the Villa Valmarana outside Vicenza) works in tandem with the building’s existing structures to transform space. He later painted a fresco in the library of the American Academy in Rome, for a private patron in New York and on several of his buildings at the TASIS American school in Switzerland.
But it’s the S. Cresci cycle that has become his pride and joy. Although he’s working pro bono, he considers this one of the more rewarding artistic projects he’s ever received. “Fresco is a challenging process,” Mayernik stresses. “It can be very physical and demanding. But it gives you a sense of continuing an age-old tradition and here in this chapel I’ve been given the opportunity to make permanent the story of this community’s patron saint.”
Note from the editor. It is unusual for an editor to ask a journalist to write about her husband but we thought that the fresco work that David Mayernik is doing is too important and too interesting to pass up only on the grounds that he is Brette Jackson‘s husband. Jackson and Mayernik have recently returned from the United States to live and work in Rome. MW
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